Economics serving society

Public consultations: who speaks out, who doesn’t? The role of interpersonal trust

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Clément Herman (APE Master)

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The great public consultations on pension reform, on road safety, the Etats généraux de l’alimentation (Estates General on Food): mechanisms for consulting citizens have multiplied in recent years, especially online, in France as well as elsewhere in the world. Driven by an ambition to involve citizens more closely in public decision making, they tend nevertheless to have a limited audience. So, which citizens choose, despite everything, to become involved in such moves?

In this Master’s thesis, Clément Herman investigates the role that interpersonal trust plays in participation in these schemes. Interpersonal trust has been highlighted in the economics literature as a key determinant in a number of economic and political behaviors, especially those called “populist”: lack of interpersonal trust is thus associated with the vote for Le Pen (1) as well as support for the Yellow Vests movement (2). Herman shows that high levels of interpersonal trust are linked to greater participation in public consultation exercises, not only at the extensive margin (to participate or not), but also at the intensive one (length of contributions), and that the content of contributions itself is affected by interpersonal trust.

He came to these conclusions through a study of the Great National Debate, a public consultation organized in France at the beginning of 2019 in response to the Yellow Vests movement. After mapping interpersonal confidence levels at the life zone level with the help of micro-simulation tools, he studied their correlation with a number of local measures of participation in the Great National Debate and the content of contributions. The life zones with the highest levels of interpersonal trust contributed the most to the Debate, expressing concerns and demands substantially different from those of the Yellow Vests. As a result, there was an over-representation of certain segments of society (the most confident) in these public consultations, to the detriment of others. An online experiment confirmed these results. Herman made volunteers participate in the “trust game” (3) in order to measure their degree of interpersonal trust, before inviting them – with no obligation – to participate in a questionnaire similar to an online consultation. The most confident participants tend to answer more questions in the questionnaire.

These results might suggest that political leaders should be much more careful in how they interpret the results of public consultations, and how they use such exercises to draft public policy or as solutions to the crisis of representative democracy. Giving their weak representativity, and their “capture” by the most confident citizens, these exercises can aggravate the lack of representation of the least confident individuals, who tend to turn towards the so-called populist movements.

(1) Algan, Y., Beasley, E., Cohen, D., & Foucault, M. (2018). The rise of populism and the collapse of the left-right paradigm: lessons from the 2017 French presidential election.
(2) Foucault, M., Algan, Y., Cohen, D., Beasley, E., & Madeleine, P. (2019). Qui sont les Gilets jaunes et leurs soutiens? (No. 2019-03). Sciences Po.
(3) Berg, J., Dickhaut, J., & McCabe, K. (1995). Trust, reciprocity, and social history. Games and economic behavior, 10(1), 122-142.

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References

Master’s thesis title: Who speaks out when politicians tune in? Interpersonal trust and participation in public consultations

Under the direction of: Ekaterina Zhuravskaya (PSE, EHESS)

Available at: https://dumas.ccsd.cnrs.fr/MEM-PSE/dumas-03045175

Contact: clement.herman at ens.fr - Linkedin Profile

Photo credit: PHOTOCREO Michal Bednarek - shutterstock